Septiembre 11, 2005

Music Come Upon By Accident

I should have been continuing to wrap up my Juarez doc, but I spent a couple hours last night and today doing a little video that I've been planning to do for a week or so, made from clips I've shot with my digital still camera (which can take little videos) over the last few months.

I call it "Incidental Music."


It's all music that I just sort of accidentally experienced, and was able to whip out my camera to capture.

All of the bits are from Portland except for the first one, which is from Mexico, on the way from Mexico City to the ruins of Teotihuancan. The second is shot from the east bank of the Williamette River, looking across the water towards downtown and hearing, all that way, the Violent Femmes play at the Bite of Oregon festival. Then there's the bike/dance troupe called The Sprockettes, and then some members of The Trash Mountain Boys, and other musicians, doing a little improv bicyclized version of La Bamba - "Zoo Bomba" at a brunch a couple weekends ago, and finally some footage of The Golden Greats, some friends that started a pretty entertaining funk band while I was out of town. I got to see them play at a party I was at.

This is one of the only videos I have edited completely outside of the world of DV. So it was kind of weird. I'm not too happy with the crunchiness of the titles as they turned out on the encoded-for-interweb file. But the whole thing is pretty lo-fi. my still cam shoots in some AVI photojpeg codec, 15 fps, half-res, mono 8-bit audio. but despite these specs it sounds and looks okay in its original form. and not even that bad here. I just with the titles were a little sharper. oh well.

anyway, enjoy. This represents slices of some of the really fun times I've had this summer, symbolized and epitomized by live musical serendipity. There's almost nothing better than just stumbliing across great music.

Posted by steev at Septiembre 11, 2005 10:24 PM
Comments
That is totally serendipidous! Thanks for sharing with the world online. Posted by: NeeNee at Septiembre 13, 2005 04:59 AM
Too bad this isn't in a format that anyone can read. Posted by: DAD at Septiembre 13, 2005 06:06 PM
anyone? what do you mean? i've received no other complaints, and there's been a couple dozen downloads so far. It's in mpeg-4, a standard, but i've heard windoze sometimes has a hard time with apple's mpeg4. if you install (or upgrade) Quicktime)it should work for you. Posted by: steev at Septiembre 13, 2005 06:24 PM